From black magic to high school woes, ELLE reviews three new novels

Playing for KeepsThe Garden of Last Days (Norton), Andre Dubus III's stout but sleek, not to mention compelling, new book, is the author's first in the nine years since he produced his bestselling tour de force, House of Sand and Fog. Inspired by the odd detail buried in the post-9/11 news coverage that some of the hijackers of that day visited strip clubs where they drank and caroused in the weeks before they guided the airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Dubus' novel asks why these jihadis would so brazenly flout Islamic law and risk distraction or even detection by participating in such forbidden activities especially when they believed they were just days away from cavorting with virgins in heaven. What might have been the repercussions of these tawdry but insignificant acts in light of the devastation to come?

More From ELLE

Dubus explores with his formidable gifts of empathy the lives and motivations of a motley cast of strangers linked only by their association with the Puma Club for Men on Florida's Gulf Coast (near where the real-life hijackers are known to have convened). There's April, a single mom whose stripper name is Spring; Lonnie, a bouncer with a soft heart and a steel fist; A.J., a down-on-his-luck construction worker who is dangerously infatuated with a girl at the club; and Bassam, a mysterious "rich little foreigner" who has been sneaking away from his Middle Eastern coconspirators in order to catch a last glimpse of Spring. When her three-year-old daughter disappears from the club one night in late-August 2001 while mom is working, everyone is suddenly implicated. Although we know how Bassamrs's story will soon turn out, and he remains to the end a bit of a cipher, Dubus keeps us anxiously wondering how many of the other characters will likewise be destroyed by a misguided but inescapable sense of duty.

A Tale of Two CitiesThe Enchantress of Florence (Random House), Salman Rushdie's eleventh work of fiction, is a beguiling, incandescent tale of travel, treachery, and transformation set in the Renaissance Florence of Machiavelli and the Medicis and in India's Mughal Empire. Written in Rushdie's signature plummy style, the story opens with the arrival of a trickster, "a yellow haired liar" named Mogor dell'Amore, in the capital city of Emperor Akbar the Great's kingdom. Drawn from his home by a secret that will "make his fortune or cost him his life," the fleet-tongued traveler mesmerizes the emperor and his court with the story of a mysterious Indian woman who herself survived a near-impossible journey to Florence to become its enchantress, and the novel's lavish, lascivious muse.

While Mogor's risky quest and fate are central to this dazzlingly intricate and convoluted novel, Rushdie ushers in a caravan of low, laughable characters in the service of his weighty and witty observations on religion, politics, sex, war, art, philosophy, and science in an East-West world of white mischief and black magic, of enigmatic nightmares and inscrutable dreams.For Rushdie, the celebrated author of, among many other titles, The Satanic Verses, which led Muslim religious leaders to call for his death, the dangers inherent in the art of storytelling underpin this prodigious fever dream of a book. As Akbar warns Mogor in one scene, "The Hindustani storyteller always knows when he loses his audience...because the audience simply gets up and leaves, or else it throws vegetables, or, if the audience is the king, it occasionally throws the storyteller headfirst off the city ramparts."

Heathers and Hidalgos
We all have our high school horror stories. Maybe only by senior year (if at all) do we feel we've found our place—which is exactly when Milagro Marquez, the heroine in Liza Monroy's debut novel, Mexican High (Spiegel & Grau), has to move schools, and countries, because her mother is a U.S. diplomat. So Mila exchanges Washington, DC, for Mexico City (the ninth place she's lived in her 16 years), enrolling at the International School of Mexico, a $40,000-a-year academy serving the highest echelons of Mexican society and the offspring of foreign professionals.At ISM, wealthy, light-skinned fresas (the Gossip Girls of the south-of-the-border set) rule and disdain the gringas. While the freethinking Mila couldn't care less about the pecking order in this overheated, undersupervised social scene, in short order she is forced to confront a whole menu of teen traumas—sexual assaults, drugs, nervous breakdowns. Then there's the issue of her dad, a married Mexican politician whom her mother refuses to identify even though they're back at the scene of the crime, so to speak. Monroy, whose own coming-of-age—surprise! closely tracks Mila's, marvelously captures modern Mexico City, from the perpetual smog that obscures the stars to the frenetic pace in the touristy downtown Zona Rosa. Through Mila's eyes, we see anew that bad things happen to good people; that we all make poor choices but get some do-overs; and that the growing pains of these years can be excruciating but also liberating.